Business Process Services White Paper Strengthening Business Operations with the Digital Five Forces
About the Author Mahesh Kshirsagar Mahesh Kshirsagar heads Technology Transformation in the Business Process Services unit of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Drawing upon his vast experience of around 25 years, Mahesh has played a key role in addressing clients business needs by architecting state-of-the-art IT solutions. As a technology leader, he has successfully incubated several technology Centers of Excellence (CoEs) and high-impact IT service lines with high revenue potential. His expertise spans various technology and architecture domains. While Mahesh has experience in various industries, he has worked most extensively in banking and nancial services.
Abstract The Digital Five Forces - social media, Big Data and analytics, mobility, arti cial intelligence and robotics, and cloud computing - are making an unprecedented impact on both business operations and our daily lives. The new, technologydriven business ecosystem is marked by growing volumes of data, more informed and connected customers, as well as increased mobility and automation. This has led to the simpli cation, rationalization, and standardization of processes for improving efficiency, accelerating revenue growth, and deepening customer engagement. This paper examines the role of the Digital Five Forces in improving business operations. In addition to outlining the operational advantages of embracing these technologies, the paper also highlights the importance of aligning people, processes, and technology with operational objectives to strengthen business outcomes.
Contents Building Competitive Advantage with the Digital Five Forces 5 Social Media: Ensuring Better Connect with Customers 6 How to Make the Most of Social 6 Analytics: Driving Insights-driven Operations 6 How to Make the Most of Analytics 7 Mobile Computing: Accelerating Business Value 7 How to Make the Most of Mobile Computing 8 Robotics Process Automation: Building Better Efficiencies 8 How to Make the Most of Robotic Process Automation 9 Cloud Computing: Enabling Improved Processing 9 How to Make the Most of Cloud 10 Preparing for the Next Level of Digital Disruption 11
Building Competitive Advantage with the Digital Five Forces 1 The Digital Five Forces - social media, cloud computing, mobility, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and analytics are making a significant impact on business operations, opening up opportunities for creating more value. By adopting these evolving technologies, enterprises can drive sizeable business benefits across their business operations. Figure 1 depicts the benefits of adopting the Digital Five Forces. Impact of Digital Five Forces on BPS Business Outcomes Workforce Performance Financials Customer Service Compliance & Risk Standardize / Optimize Accuracy / Productivity Predictability Improve Bottom-Line Enhance Top-Line Competitive Pricing Customer Satisfaction Acquire / Retain Customers Manage Market Sentiments Improve Compliance Reduce Operations Risks Enhance Awareness Social Media Big Data / Analytics Mobility Artificial Intelligence Cloud Computing Gainful Adoption of Digital Five Forces Leads to Increased Competitiveness and Branding Figure 1. Benefits of adopting the Digital Five Forces The Digital Five Forces help enhance accuracy, productivity, turnaround time, and predictability in business operations through standardization and optimization of workforce management processes. They help improve both the top and the bottom line by ensuring that business operations are run at competitive price points. By adopting the Digital Five Forces, enterprises can improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) as well as effectively acquire and retain customers. Furthermore, with the help of digital technologies, risk management can be fortified to eliminate compliance-related losses. 1 TCS Global Trend Study July 2014, The Road to Reimagination: The State and High Stakes of Digital Initiatives, http://sites.tcs.com/stateofdigital/ 5
The following sections examine the role of each of the Digital Five Forces in improving business operations. Social Media: Ensuring Better Connect with Customers Customers are increasingly using social media and mobile applications to interact and engage with companies, allowing companies to develop a better understanding of and a much closer relationship with customers. Analysis of relevant social media content helps effectively address customer queries, resolve customer complaints, and highlight relevant endorsements, leading to enhanced customer experience. Social media insights can also be used to drive effective cross-selling and up-selling initiatives, resulting in higher yield and revenues. How to Make the Most of Social Enterprises can enhance business operations by aligning their people, processes, and technology with the new social media dynamics. People: Enterprises require the right people who thoroughly understand social media communication channels in terms of the level of engagement and commitment needed to enhance customer service. These personnel must have expertise in social media monitoring and associated data analysis, and the ability to provide advisory services. Regular training ensures that they are aware of evolving concepts and technologies. Processes: When social media insights are applied by domain experts managing business processes, they can effectively simplify, rationalize, or reimagine these processes. It is therefore important to build a sound customer engagement strategy that is integrated across all social media channels to gain a single view of the customer. Technology: Robust infrastructure is essential to facilitating effective customer engagement on social media, and assuring customers that enterprises are listening to them. Through social listening, enterprises can understand their customers needs and preferences based on their online interactions with each other. It is also important to have a strategy that integrates incumbent Customer Resource Management (CRM) applications with social media tools and dashboards. Analytics: Driving Insights-driven Operations Analytics plays a crucial role in turning the huge data streams into contextual insights that catalyze better business decisions, leading to an increased competitive advantage. It facilitates informed decisionmaking and enables contextual early warning indicators. These lead to data-driven actions that result in continuous process improvements. 6
Actionable business insights also help optimize business processes by providing the ability to respond in real time. Enterprises can apply these insights to align their processes effectively with business goals such as top-line growth and bottom-line improvement, and enhanced customer management. How to Make the Most of Analytics As in the case of social media, enterprises can realize superior outcomes by better aligning the elements of people, process, and technology with their operational goals. People: To get the best out of analytics Big Data or otherwise enterprises need data scientists to interpret data and derive business insights. The core skillset needed is the ability to uncover hidden patterns and unknown correlations to enable effective decision making. Quantitative (structured) data must be brought together with contextual qualitative (unstructured) data using a vetted approach driven by effective analytical techniques and technology. Process: Analytics can help organizations improve business processes. Business analytics provide a holistic view of KPIs and cover a wide range of areas from finance and customer management to product and service management. Operations analytics encompass a range of activities from analyzing the performance of business processing (to improve the overall yield) to analyzing errors in order to eliminate them. Through risk and compliance analytics, enterprises can discover the risks and vulnerabilities in business operations, and take corrective action for enforcement of the compliance norms. Technology: Enterprises need an effective approach in terms of selection of appropriate analytical models and algorithms. Along with Big Data, all other relevant data sources also need to be considered and combined to derive actionable insights. Descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics need to be used based on the agreed scope and the expected outcome. The outcome of this analytics also needs to be in an easy to consume format. Animated visualization, personalized visualization, and visual queries can be used to offer actionable alerts and guide decision-making. In terms of hardware, Big Data analytics requires high-performing hardware capacity, which is now available at compelling price points due to cloud computing. Mobile Computing: Accelerating Business Value Mobile computing accelerates front and back-office as well as mid-office processing, facilitating process simplification, rationalization, and reimagination. Existing processes can be replaced with mobile computing and mobile-enabled business applications to enable easy access. Contextual data is automatically funneled to relevant employees, thus reducing inefficiencies. Enterprises can thus achieve increased process efficacy, leading to reduced turnaround time, higher service quality, and lower cost of business operations. With more stakeholders using mobile devices at work, it is however necessary to provide safe and secured access to business applications. 7
How to Make the Most of Mobile Computing Enterprises can align people, processes, and technology with their operational goals to realize enhanced advantages from mobile computing. People: Enterprises need to provide consistent or enhanced user experiences on mobile devices. Relevant information should be pushed out to stakeholders, and they should have intuitive and contextual access to information. In addition, users must be able to act on the data with minimal processing and delays in rendering the information. Processes: Mobile computing enhances transaction processing, workflow management, collaboration and content management, imaging, and business intelligence. A mobility-enabled front-office can reduce the time taken to bring customers on-board. Similarly, mobile computing facilitates a more efficient midoffice that supports accelerated financial and regulatory decisions. Back-office processing also improves, enabling rapid resolution and efficient management of a wide range of transaction processing. A mobile-enabled workflow facilitates timely actions and enhanced collaboration. Advances in mobile computing enable the field force to take sharper and clearer photos of relevant business operations data and make them instantaneously available. Furthermore, the availability of insights in the form of business operations reports, notifications, and early warning indicators on mobile devices significantly impacts the efficacy of operational and tactical decisions. Technology: Mobile enabled business applications are developed in 'Write Once Run Anywhere' (WORA) format. However, the form factor of the mobile device needs to be considered while designing the application. It remains critical to ensure secure deployment of mobile-enabled business applications that function on minimal network bandwidth. Robotics Process Automation: Building Better Efficiencies Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the application of artificial intelligence in business operations. A typical demand on business operations is to continuously increase efficiency and effectiveness by first doing more with the same, and then doing more with less. This expectation is driven by factors such as fierce competition, fast changing regulatory and compliance guidelines, and customer demands for higher quality of services at a lower cost. RPA helps meet these demands. The typical application of RPA in business operations is to automate repetitive manual tasks that are well defined and structured. In addition to this, RPA can be deployed in business operations driven by knowledge intensive business rules. It can also be applied in customer interaction management, where routine and predictable customer interactions can be automated for faster and customized responses. However, RPA should not be used for tasks that are governed by ideas and demand a combination of creativity, critical thinking, and experience. 8
How to Make the Most of Robotic Process Automation As with other digital forces, better alignment of people, processes, and technology with operational needs can ensure that RPA delivers greater value. People: Effective deployment of RPA calls for adequate checks and controls that are managed by humans. When RPA yields less than 100 percent automation, humans are needed to validate the accuracy of the output and subsequently complete the pending activities. Even where RPA promises 100 percent automation, the output needs to be checked by humans through periodic sampling. This means that while dependency on humans is reduced, it is not completely eliminated. Therefore, people need to be trained to reorient themselves for optimal results from RPA. Processes: RPA can be used to either automate or semi-automate data processing for enhanced accuracy, productivity and turnaround time, and reduced risks. It also provides an effective audit trail of all decisions and data points. When applied to decision-making, RPA codifies the tacit knowledge practiced by humans into structured business rules. This reduces the training period for new employees. Technology: The technology enabling RPA is typically non-intrusive in nature. This means solutions in this domain complement existing business applications and address gaps that reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations. The three key areas where RPA is typically adopted are workforce management, data processing, and decision-making. RPA enhances key areas of workforce management such as work scheduling, work allocation, and forecasting; this facilitates optimal resource deployment and utilization to guarantee SLA adherence at a minimal cost. Automation also improves forecasting of workloads in both normal and exceptional scenarios based on process characteristics. RPA delivers these results in data processing: Eliminates or significantly reduces the need for an associate to toggle between multiple IT applications Enables contextual image processing (either by automating data processing or digitizing relevant image content) Facilitates Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text mining to derive insights and recommend the right actions Cloud Computing: Enabling Improved Processing Business operations teams are increasingly adopting cloud computing as it helps contain costs. However, enterprises need to perform a well vetted assessment to identify business processes that can be executed on the cloud and those that can continue to be hosted within the company. The assessment also helps in creating a strategy for managing the integration between the processes run in-house and on the cloud. 9
To validate the business case for cloud computing, it is essential to factor in the quality and flexibility of the delivery as well as regulatory and compliance issues. There is an increased shift towards Business Process as a Service (BPaaS), which entails delivery of business process services on a single platform. Here, the service provider not only provides the IT application software infrastructure as Software as a Service (SaaS) but also executes the business processes. How to Make the Most of Cloud Here is how enterprises can align their people, process, and technology to get the most out of cloud computing. People: The most significant impact of BPaaS is crowdsourcing. Business operations that are not knowledge-oriented and are very structured and robust, such as data entry of application forms, can be managed through crowdsourcing. In this process, contents of the application form can be divided into smaller but discrete sections and allocated to agents for data entry. These smaller but discrete digitized contents can be integrated by a BPaaS solution. Thus, through crowd sourcing, BPaaS can enable ondemand but secure, consistent, integrated, and remote data processing. Process: Which business operations should use cloud computing? Thorough assessment of core and complementary business processes operations is essential to arrive at the answer to this question. Some of the key processes where the BPaaS model is effectively leveraged include: Mature and streamlined finance and accounting (F&A), human resource (HR), and supply chain management (SCM) processes Data acquisition and analytics, end-user data visualization, reporting, and interaction Compliance testing that involves promoting compliance standards and detecting potential violations to help reduce operational risks Voice services including services managed through IP-based networks To drive better value, business and IT need to be strongly aligned with each other. Furthermore, a Center of Excellence (CoE) can be formed to drive the adoption of cloud computing. Technology: Cloud computing has been around for a while now and has matured significantly. Technology services enabled by cloud computing provide significant cost benefits to business operations. These technology services include: Storage as a Service: Helps manage and backup suitable business data by remotely leveraging public, private, and hybrid cloud. Desktop as a Service: Serves as an alternate to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in business operations. It is secure and flexible, delivers high performance, and is available at lower cost. Network as a Service: Enables functionalities such as Virtual Private Network (VPN) and bandwidth on demand (based on business operations workload). 10
Security as a Service: Includes Identity and Access Management (IAM), anti-virus, anti-malware, antispyware, intrusion detection, and security event management. Disaster Recovery as a Service: Enables faster recovery of IT applications and data (with improved Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective) as well as multi-site availability at a lower cost. Preparing for the Next Level of Digital Disruption The Digital Five Forces will continue to transform business operations and the way businesses engage with their customers. To realize real value, enterprises need flexible structures, an innovative culture, and the capabilities to take advantage of the new opportunities. By forming valuable partnerships across business functions and leveraging the right technologies, the CIO will be able to play a more strategic role in leading the enterprise towards customer-driven innovation. While it is critical to achieve error-free and risk-free business operations, it is also essential to ensure cost effectiveness. This is why businesses are shifting to output (transaction) based pricing or outcome based pricing. Furthermore, CIOs also need to leverage digital technologies with the least possible investment. Businesses and markets are poised to undergo unprecedented transformation in the near future. Enterprises that are quick to adapt to the technology-led changes are most likely to survive and thrive in this new environment. 11
About TCS Business Process Services Unit Enterprises seek to drive business growth and agility through innovation in an increasingly regulated, competitive, and global market. TCS helps clients achieve these goals by managing and executing their business operations effectively and efficiently. TCS' Business Process Services (BPS) include core industry-specific processes, analytics and insights, and enterprise services such as finance and accounting, HR, and supply chain management. TCS TM creates value through its FORE simplification and transformation methodology, backed by its deep TM domain expertise, extensive technology experience, and TRAPEZE suite of solution accelerators and governance enablers. TCS complements its experience and expertise with innovative delivery models such as using robotic automation and providing Business Processes as a Service (BPaaS). TCS BPS unit has been positioned in the leaders quadrant for various service lines by many leading analyst firms. With over four decades of global experience and a delivery footprint spanning six continents, TCS is one of the largest BPS providers today. Contact For more information about TCS Business Process Services Unit, visit: www.tcs.com/bps (http://www.tcs.com/bps) Email: bps.connect@tcs.com Subscribe to TCS White Papers TCS.com RSS: http://www.tcs.com/rss_feeds/pages/feed.aspx?f=w Feedburner: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/tcswhitepapers About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled infrastructure, engineering and TM assurance services. This is delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery Model, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata Group, India s largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has a global footprint and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at www.tcs.com IT Services Business Solutions Consulting All content / information present here is the exclusive property of Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS). The content / information contained here is correct at the time of publishing. No material from here may be copied, modified, reproduced, republished, uploaded, transmitted, posted or distributed in any form without prior written permission from TCS. Unauthorized use of the content / information appearing here may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties. Copyright 2015 Tata Consultancy Services Limited TCS BPS Design Services I 08 I 15